Just be careful if you are looking to play PAL video format DVDs (a lot of Region 2 fit this). The United States and Japan use NTSC, while the UK and a number of others use PAL. You need to have a PAL to NTSC converter built into the player.

Some of the newer discs that are being released are designed for newer DVD players that can handle the upgraded discs (yes there is a difference between the disc format they used a few years ago and now for some discs - cannot recall the names offhand but it's sometimes described and explained on some of those Brentwood releases in their DVD Dictionary sections). In some cases, an older player will have troubles playing said discs. As I understand it, this is the case with the Universal releases which may very well play fine on another DVD Player.

What you might be talking about there is "Dual Layer" discs JaseSF. A newer format of dvd as JaseSF mentioned, Dual Layer Dvds can have trouble playing on some older style dvd players. Most of the time a firmware upgrade will solve the problem, but at work we occasionally need to send a player away to replace the drive completely.

A dvd player not suited to handling these dvds will just refuse to read them, not skip them [as far as I know].

The only trouble I've ever had with my dvds are ones which are scratched in just the wrong place, or copied dvds on a poor quality transfer.

Hmmm... its funny but most dvds players released here are quite easy to or come standard as multi-zoned, and most do both PAL and NTSC...

There's a difference in the DVDs, some of it may have to do with dual-layering yes. Some of the newer DVDs (called I believe DVD18s or is it DVD25s? I can never seem to remember) move at a faster speed in your player and supposedly have more storage room for information (at least I think that's what it is)...anyways to put it basically some newer DVD players are better equipped to deal with these newer DVD formats (which I believe Universal in particular has adpoted) than older players.